Picking up on yesterday's theme, there are more good analyses popping up of the current situation, particularly of the Occupy Wall Street phenomenon. Over on his blog, Walter Russell Mead calls attention to an analysis by Megan McArdle at The Atlantic. She builds on the essay I linked to yesterday by Kenneth Anderson, who argues that the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) movement really represents an intra-class conflict between the upper and middle tiers of the (his word) virtueocracy.
Before returning to that thread, I first want to call more attention to to this piece from Anne Applebaum in the Daily Telegraph, "Can America survive without its backbone, the middle class?" This quote helps frame the issue,
"Despite all the loud talk of the “1 per cent” of Americans who, according to a recent study, receive about 17 percent of the income, a percentage which has more than doubled since 1979, the existence of a very small group of very rich people has never bothered Americans. But the fact that some 20 per cent of Americans now receive some 53 per cent of the income is devastating."
Rich Lowry, in the New York Post, picks up on a theme of inter-class struggle in "Stuck at the Bottom: Culture and the American Dream." He concludes, "old-fashioned bourgeois virtues, and particularly marriage, rarely figure in the public debate. Everyone is more comfortable talking about taxes or the banks, as the American Dream frays."
Finally, from Sunday, Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times about stresses on the middle class and diminishing expectations. While the OWS crowd may harbor some legitimate (if well-hidden) grievances, their preferred policy solutions--higher taxes and a bigger government--will only lead to more grief,
"The public-sector workplace has become a kind of artificial Eden, whose fortunate inhabitants enjoy solid pay and 1950s-style job security and retirement benefits, all of it paid for by their less-fortunate private-sector peers. Some on the left have convinced themselves that this 'success' can lay the foundation for a broader middle-class revival. But if a bloated public sector were the blueprint for a thriving middle-class society, then the whole world would be beating a path to Greece’s door."
Instead, Douthat makes an argument for what he terms "small-government egalitarianism," which to my ears sounds a lot like "aspirational conservatism" combined with "redesigning government." His concept,
"would seek to reform the government before we pour more money into it, along lines that encourage upward mobility and benefit the middle class. This would mean seeking a carefully means-tested welfare state, a less special interest-friendly tax code, and a public sector that worked for taxpayers and parents rather than the other way around."
Back to McArdle's analysis, "The Rage of the Almost-Elite." Picking up on Anderson's analysis, she extends it, by harkening back to this work by George Orwell from the last century, where he describes another time and place occupied by the "wreckage left behind when the tide of Victorian prosperity receded."
McArdle touches on the culture theme, as did Lowry, not to praise "old-fashioned bourgeois virtues" as he did, but to explain why members of Anderson's "New Class" seem so obligated to trash those same virtues,
"It's not entirely crazy to suspect, as Orwell did, that this has something to do with money. Specifically, you sneer at the customs of the people you might be mistaken for."
But McArdle confirms with her experience that the New Class saves their ire more for the tier directly above them, than the classes they view as below them,
"They didn't see it coming. Yes, yes, maybe they were naive about the possibilities of a fulfilling and secure life in the field of non-profit environmental management. Probably they should not have sunk tens of thousands of dollars into acquiring a BFA. But these mistakes didn't usually used to be crippling.... Unfortunately their choices became utterly, horrifyingly disastrous just at the moment when we had a terrible financial crisis that spiked our unemployment rate up to 10%."
I find much of this analysis persuasive in explaining current events, like the OWS protests. More importantly, these analyses show the Internet at its finest. Rather than fomenting dissent and spreading confusion, analysts around the globe are able to read and react to each others' work almost in real time, strengthening arguments and building on one another.
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